Finding Inspiration to Build a Website

Too often the inspiration behind an idea is presented as if it were a moment; waking up from a dream in the middle of the night, standing in line at Starbucks or hitting your head on the bathroom sink. The ideas are complete and perfect without any further thought needed, just need to turn the idea into reality.

Maybe I’m the odd one out, but I know for my website project that just wasn’t the case. The inspiration for it was slow and curated over months until it got to a point where it felt like a successful idea and was something I was passionate to start.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is also the first post in explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

The Inspiration Behind My Website

The idea behind my website Capture Gwinnett, which is a local county guide, information and news website, started when my county started to build a baseball stadium near my house which would be the home of the Atlanta Braves minor league baseball team that was previously in Richmond, VA. I got to see the land for the stadium being cleared and watch the progress of the stadium being built on my drive into work each morning. One day it occurred to me that I bet others who live in my county might also like to see the progress of the stadium being built, but don’t drive by that way normally. So then I thought it would be cool if someone had a website that posted pictures each day of the progress of the stadium.

That idea came and left without anymore thought put to it. It was just something that would be cool, but hardly something I had the time to do myself.

Another idea came to me when one of my favorite local coffeeshops closed. This was a cool little café that had large oil paintings on the wall and nice cozy vibe to the place. It was located in a decent spot near a Wal-mart and had some decent exposure, so I was a bit perplexed as to why it failed. As they were closing and liquidating the inventory I found myself wishing there were some local website that could help promote these small independent businesses. My county is full of large franchises and has very few local independent restaurants to help give it more of a city vibe. The few that do open, rarely stay open for long.

This concept of giving promotion and helping these small businesses hung around with me and my thoughts about building my local county guide website began to coalesce.

After those incidents mentioned above, I starting looking around my county for other things I could write about that would help validate my idea. My county has had a large resurgence of restoring the historic city districts, some that have been around for over 150 years, plus some of the cities have been building large community centers that hold concerts, farmer’s markets and other community events throughout the year. These things encouraged me to know that there is a effort being made to build stronger communities and so a website to help organize and build a virtual community was possible.

I had been collected ideas here and there and been thinking more and more about making this site for a few months later. The real tipping point came when I read Seth Godin’s Linchpin. That book and his focus on his blog at the time dealt with how important it is to quite being afraid of failure and to just ship something. It’s easy to be ‘working’ or ‘thinking’ about a project but the real test comes when you actually ship it. It was the motivation I needed to really start pursing this project.

Take Away Thoughts about Finding Inspiration

I believe inspiration is something that has to cultivated.

You might just have an inkling of an idea, but the only way to grow it is to grab a pad, and pen and some coffee and sit still for 30 minutes and just write down ideas about it. Talk about the idea to someone even when the entire concept can be relayed in three sentences. Put yourself in situations that force you to actively think about it. Think about it so much that you get to a point when you feel ashamed to be talking to someone yet again about your idea but not have anything to show for it.

Then when that happens, commit to making the idea into a reality and move on to the next phase of Building a Website: Set Site Goals.